The sticky town council confusion that reigned over the mass resignation of the Zoning Board of Appeals a few months ago seems to have oozed into the deliberations of another board.

The Charter Commission evidently is under the illusion it was convened as a compensation committee rather than a government improvement panel judging by its most recent and ill-timed proposal to raise the salary of the town council president to $50,000 a year from $12,000.

With a sitting councilor, Greg Milne of Precinct 13, and ex-councilors Richard Clark of Barnstable Village and Sue Rohrbach of Centerville on the commission, critics could make a case for attempted featherbedding -- creating an expensive neither-nor hybrid position whose efficacy is much in question.

This particular raise is a dim idea coming at a time when nervous business owners are gnawing their fingernails and the local low-wage retail/service industry labor force that dominates the Cape economy frets and sweats over a feverish financial crisis that could well freeze their puny pay or obliterate their job.

There is supposed to be an element of noblesse oblige in public service and it’s doubtful that creating an untried hybrid councilor with considerable compensation is sympathetic to current fiscal realities.

Wage freezes are already being implemented in various businesses here that one would have thought were healthy enough to slip another buck into their wallets -- but can’t.

Maybe the “presidential” pay increase is artifice for eventually working the town up to a real, bona fide mayor directly answerable to the voters and offering a balance of power to a town council that, we have learned from the zoning board fiasco and other indelicate situations in 2008, is equally adept at screwing things up as it is at making some good decisions.

The town already has a well-paid hierarchy of public servants doing yeoman’s work without added interference of some kind of political czar looking for gears on which to use his or her monkey wrench. There is a town manager, an assistant town manager, a superintendent of schools (very well paid and earning it in this moment of economic grief), a superintendent of public works, a director of the Growth Management Department, overseers at the solid and not-so-solid waste facilities, human resources and airport managers, police and fire chiefs and sub-chiefs, directors of recreation, procurement, health, marine and environmental affairs, information technology, legal, finance, conservation, community services ad infinitum.

The town manager gets a lot of input from these experts who administer their departments rather well without another nose tripping into the minutiae of daily operations.

If one asked Tony Soprano over the pool table at Bada Bings for his opinion, he’d probably agree the one thing the town doesn’t have, and some citizens think it should have, is a Capa di tutti Capi -- a boss of all bosses.

To gamble that a part-time councilor masquerading as the nucleus of political consensus is the answer to improving local governance is like betting your 401K that Hamas and Israel will make lasting peace tomorrow promptly at 10 a.m.

Fiscally conservative residents aren’t receptive to the idea of paying a councilor $50,000 year -- even if he or she chooses to be a more or less full-time president elected by the people, a faux-mayor with equally faux-powers.

If the Charter Commission knows there is substantial community resistance to counting out more taxpayer dollars for other than a full-time mayor, then one could assume it’s just another move to preserve the status quo, in other words, give the voters something they won’t vote for and, as The Beatles might put it, “let it be, let it be, let it be.”

One would have thought that Councilor Greg Milne, an overt pro-mayor supporter who did a lot of footwork to get the signatures and the public vote for the commission, would be pounding the table along with pro-mayor commission member Lucien Poyant to get that option out for a vote rather than capitulate to the tweakers on the board.

Instead, on the night the commissioners voted the $50,000 pay raise idea, promoted oddly enough by Milne, he turned happily excited to somebody in the meeting room as though he had just kicked the winning field goal at the Superbowl. Another score?

Hardly.

If this is the best the Charter Commission can do -- again deny the voters the opportunity to put the mayor issue to rest one way or the other -- it ought to follow the former zoning board out the door and call it a day.